The Trump Land Mine By Victor Davis Hanson
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/president-trump-deep-state-critics-risk-blow
Explosives require careful handling. Sometimes they blow up in your face.
After the 2016 election, the so-called deep state was confident that it had the power easily to either stop, remove, or delegitimize the outlier Donald Trump and his presidency.
Give it credit, the Washington apparat quite imaginatively pulled out all the stops: implanting Obama holdover appointees all over the Trump executive branch; filing lawsuits and judge shopping; organizing the Resistance; pursuing impeachment writs; warping the FISA courts; weaponizing the DOJ and FBI; attempting to disrupt the Electoral College; angling for enactment of the 25th Amendment or the emoluments clause; and unleashing Hollywood celebrities, Silicon Valley, and many in Wall Street to suffocate the Trump presidency in its infancy.
Silicon Valley likewise has lost its luster. Once upon a time, America loved a hip Steve Jobs, decked out in black, fiddling with a new Apple gadget on stage in front of an entranced televised audience of millions. Jobs appeared as a brilliant and typically American entrepreneur, not a partisan talking down to hoi polloi.
Things have radically changed since then. The reputation of Big Tech is one of hyper-partisan politics, data miners, snoops, Bowdlerizers and censors, monopolists, progressive multibillionaires, and adolescents in arrested development who exempt themselves from the consequences of what their ideologies inflict on others.
If the deep state really wanted to dismantle and disarm Donald Trump, it would have been wise first to carefully learn how he was constructed and wired — and thus why he was especially dangerous to them.
In Wizard of Oz fashion, it’s as if the public is no longer frightened of the omnipotent imperial faces on their screens — once it drew apart the high-tech curtains and exposed tiny little nerds with nasal voices furiously working levers and gears to project deceptive all-powerful images. Even a four-trillion-dollar industry can take only so many scandals like those at Theranos, Facebook data mining, deliberately slowed-down iPhones, fatally texting drivers, and Mark Zuckerbergs.
Donald Trump proved to be a catalyst for much of the implosion of the deep state. Land mines require careful handling. Only arrogant naïfs think that they can rush in, grab them, and carelessly and safely toss them away — clueless that they themselves are exposed as reckless moments before they blow themselves up.
If the deep state really wanted to dismantle and disarm Donald Trump, it would have been wise first to carefully learn how he was constructed and wired — and thus why he was especially dangerous to them. Then to disarm him, elites would have had to offer superior agendas to his supporters, while engaging in reasoned debates and alternative visions — working with him when they found common and shared solutions, playing the loyal opposition when there did not.
Instead, the government, the political apparat, the media, tech, and entertainment conglomerates sought to reduce Trump to some monstrous entity deserving of hanging, stabbing, decapitation, incineration, and shooting. It sought to indict, impeach, and remove a sitting president, as the ancien régime rushed to break federal law with assumed ethical exemption — tapping, surveilling, lying, and leaking with impunity, assured that supposedly morally superior ends justified any means necessary to achieve them.
In other words, the custodians of the status quo arrogantly grabbed up the Trump land mine and thought they could easily toss it away — as it has blown them sky-high.
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